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A figure from Gang of Seven, one of several installations by Mike Nelson now at the Power Plant. (Murray Whyte / Toronto Star)

A figure from Gang of Seven, one of several installations by Mike Nelson now at the Power Plant. (Murray Whyte / Toronto Star)

Mike Nelson's Double negative: The Genie, a new piece made for the Power Plant about the artist's late collaborator, Erland Williamson. The photocopiers appear to be randomly reproducing pages of Williamson's unfinished travelogue. (Toronto Star / Colin McConnell)

There's a strangely mythic quality to A Quiver of Arrows, Mike Nelson's outsize installation currently eating up significant square footage inside the Power Plant, and it's not just the creepily suggestive interiors of the four dank old Airstream trailers that comprise it. Quiver is something of a white whale of the recent art world: Rarely seen — only once before, at 303 Gallery in New York, four years ago — and all the more legendary because of it.

Circling its dull and battered steel hide, it's not hard to guess why. Perched up on wooden support structures and bashed together in a makeshift ring, the trailers, rusty wheels dangling from their undercarriages and all, aren't the easiest piece in the world to accommodate. The Power Plant had to remove one of its structural walls just to get it inside.

Size, apparently, matters to Nelson, a celebrated Brit who's been nominated for the Turner Prize, and who represented his country at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Quiver isn't even his largest work; that distinction goes to his 2007 piece A Psychic Vacuum, a labyrinthine installation that occupied an entire building on New York's Lower East Side. His 2001 work The Coral Reef, consisting of 15 rooms, earned him a Turner nomination, and was on display at the Tate Britain in London until 2011.

So Quiver is fairly modest, by comparison, plying many of the same themes in a portable — everything's relative — package. Climb the rickety staircase and step inside, and Quiver gives the sense of tumbling down the rabbit hole, insistently buffered from the world outside.

Nelson's work is eminently readable. He decorates his creation with leading symbols — a wizened knife, ground down from years of sharpening, lies on a counter; books on Hindu and Muslim philosophy are scattered throughout; a casserole dish caked with ossified, unidentifiable starchy food sits in a sink — that suggest a band of outsiders forced into a quick exit. (The smell, of years of mouldering dankness, adds a nice air of authenticity to Nelson's eerily abandoned scene, but was probably inevitable given the age and decrepitude of the trailers themselves.)

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Nelson could well have larded on intellectual references to satisfy the smug (the art world has plenty of those), and with a weathered copy of Camillo Berneri's book on anarchist-socialist philosopher Peter Kropotkin placed strategically on an arborite table strewn with random gears and screws, he comes dangerously close (more on that later).

Quiver also veers close to clichéd outsidery motifs — Kropotkin, Eastern philosophy, one trailer mysteriously festooned with crumbling Arabic writing and Islamic imagery — but Nelson salvages it with an impenetrable sense of mystery and dread. One trailer features a pile of old motorcycle helmets, with a snowy TV droning quiet static. Rusted king cans of Schlitz are littered throughout; an old scale with a spoon perched beside it suggests the drug trade. A handwritten note, pinned next to a mirror and a broken crucifix, professes devotion to “Guru Maharaj.”

A cult leader? Maybe. There is nothing specific here, and this is where Quiver succeeds: With its insistent randomness, Nelson evokes fringe cultures and the world of the outsider with a breadth that positions those marginal as pervasive, persistent and ever-present.

The Airstreams, I think, are more than simply convenient forms (low-ceilinged, they're perfectly claustrophobic for his purpose). As loaded symbols of a new kind of freedom afforded by the mid-century explosion of car ownership and the building of superhighways, they're freighted with the gilded promises of modernity. Things were supposed to get better; fluid mobility was meant to be not just literal, but social. Quiver embraces that naïve dream and deflates it: Some of us will always be on the outside, looking in.

Speaking of outsiders, it bears mentioning that Quiver is just one part of “Amnesiac Hide,” a show of Nelson's work that eats up the whole gallery. The Amnesiacs, in Nelson's personal mythology, are a roaming gang of bikers he created in the '90s to elide the dense, theory-heavy expectations of the era and craft work closer to the bone.

They were something of a get-out-jail-free card: By using them as surrogates, he could couch his more visceral object-making impulses in a mediated conceptual framework more suitable to the time (in a tacit acknowledgment to the oppressive egg-headedness he was facing, Nelson once compared his strategy to Soviet activists writing low-tech sci-fi as a way to evade Communist censorship).

The Amnesiacs weren't just a convenient construct. Nelson created them partly as a means to deal to the death of his friend and collaborator Erlend Williamson in 1996, and his spectre looms large here, quite literally. In one gallery, Nelson presents a stream of photographs of lonely stretches of Canadian wilderness, next to a display chock-full of Williamson's various belongings: books and paintings, cameras, a tripod, hiking boots and climbing ropes. Upstairs, with Double Negative (The Genie), he mythologizes Williamson further, with multiple photocopiers producing reams of Williamson's partly finished travelogue strewn on the floor.

In any case, if it's not hard to imagine Quiver as the Amnesiacs home base — and it's not — then cross the hall and find some of their handiwork. Gang of Seven, which Nelson produced last year in Vancouver for the Contemporary Art Gallery there, is a crudely charming bricolage of flotsam he collected from various beaches.

But it's the rough and tumble Amnesiacs, not the high-minded contemporary artist, who are given credit: A tattered sheaf of tar paper dangles from a pole planted in an old tire; a deer's skull is fitted to a pole fixed in a concrete base. Human figures cobbled from branches, empty bottles, Styrofoam and discarded lumber populate the scene, suggesting crude self-portraiture of a small crew of misfits exulting in their creepy project.

There's a slight, overly self-conscious sheen here of the love-in the art world has had recently with so-called “outsider” art — work produced by untrained amateurs (or more accurately, those without Ivy League MFAs), as exuberantly made as the bits may be.

But that's a small complaint. Nelson's work is straightforward, sincere and powerful because of it. To me, Nelson is an outsider at heart who snuck his way in and stayed a while, which makes him something of a trailblazer. That path is nowhere near well-enough worn, but here's hoping.

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